Chirlane McCray and the Limits of First-Ladyship

What two years in Gracie Mansion have meant for a woman who aspired to be the “voice for the forgotten voices.”

Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray.CreditCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

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By Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Feb. 9, 2016

The first time I had lunch with Chirlane McCray at Gracie Mansion, I was distracted by the wallpaper. This was just about a year after her husband, Bill de Blasio, was sworn in as mayor of New York. In a breathlessly short period, McCray had gone from being a poet, wife and mother, with a job writing ad copy for a neighborhood hospital, to being first lady of New York City with a day-to-day schedule that could consist of everything from reading books to kindergartners in a classroom in East New York to exchanging pleasantries with Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge.

Standing near the head of a long, polished dining table, as a young white woman in a chef’s uniform recited the lunch menu, McCray repeated our choices to me and her chief of staff. But my attention kept drifting to the walls, where a Zuber wallpaper from the 1830s depicted a maiden, her complexion a flushed peaches and cream, trapped in an almost-embrace with a pale and severe-looking soldier in a red-and-blue military uniform. Before they moved into Gracie, McCray and de Blasio lived in a vinyl-sided townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and worked out at the local Y.M.C.A. Shortly after de Blasio became mayor, McCray said she would be a ‘‘voice for the forgotten voices,’’ because, she said, ‘‘black women do not have as many positive images in the media as we should.’’ How did it feel for that woman to regularly dine within this patrician fantasy?

I thought of the wallpaper again last month, as de Blasio’s second year in office came to a close. Report cards about his administration were being issued by the city’s dailies, and many concerned his famous pledge, as a candidate, to end the ‘‘tale of two cities,’’ the lasting chasm that income inequality had created in the city. Now, at the halfway mark, a common refrain was that the mayor’s record on this was ‘‘mixed.’’ Josh Greenman of The New York Daily News wrote that de Blasio’s prekindergarten and pedestrian-safety initiatives were two of his most significant wins, but Greenman criticized the mayor for struggling to get a grip on the city’s homeless problem, for his ‘‘blurry’’ attempt to fix struggling schools and for his brinkmanship with Albany. But his most telling critique was that the mayor was still pushing ahead with his campaign promises: ‘‘To build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing within a decade. To get all second-graders reading at grade level over that same span. To extend mental-health help to thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers who struggle with everything from depression to schizophrenia.’’ De Blasio was trying to tackle the impossible in a city that was both fearful of and impatient with reform. ‘‘De Blasio’s pledges are so seismic,’’ Greenman wrote, ‘‘his language so grandiloquent, that he gives the impression of being insufficiently grounded, destined to overpromise and underdeliver.’’

The Daily News was right about many things, but it overlooked the most relevant questions. De Blasio sold himself as a mayor who would try to end the effects of income inequality. But for whom? The entire city or those who were the most neglected? While much ado has been made about de Blasio’s dismal approval ratings with white voters, white voters are statistically not the people who will determine if de Blasio has a second term. What is much more important is how de Blasio and McCray are each being forced to navigate their obligations to the black and minority New Yorkers who overwhelmingly voted for them.

What made de Blasio exceptional during his campaign in 2013 was his ability to convincingly articulate what many minority families had never heard a white man say publicly about race. He understood their fears and related to them. He was the one candidate who seemed to know intimately the fatigue that many of them felt after 12 years of Michael Bloomberg’s leadership as mayor. This was in large part because of the woman by his side with the long dreadlocks, tiny nose ring and activist past. Though she had obviously not made de Blasio black, she gave black New Yorkers a sense of representation, a sense that unlike Rudolph W. Giuliani or Bloomberg, her husband did not lack empathy toward their concerns.

What this meant for de Blasio was obvious; what it meant for McCray was less so. Her gift and her burden for the next four years would be navigating the very real expectations and over­identifications being placed upon her. When I asked McCray at that lunch about her new life, she only laughed at the obvious growing pains that she was enduring. ‘‘There’s no manual,’’ she said. ‘‘There’s just no manual. Donna Hanover called and invited me out. We had lunch, and she offered advice. Hillary offered advice. Michelle Obama offered advice. Joyce Dinkins.’’ She counted them in her very deliberate way and then added: ‘‘I spoke with all of them, which was wonderful. Especially Donna, who was the first one to offer.’’

McCray seemed to understand that she was being opaque if not impenetrable, that her answer had revealed nothing. ‘‘Think about campaigns and about first ladies and how you see them, what they can do. Jill Biden. Right? Michelle? Jill Biden in government is not as prominent, right? It is not as prominent a role, and you don’t expect her to have as prominent a role.’’ McCray shot quick, furtive glances at her plate and then her aides. ‘‘It’s very different from the campaign,’’ she said, before pausing to add, ‘‘When you become first lady, it’s like, ‘O.K., now what do you do?’ ’’

McCray can be both personable and evasive. She often offers a warm smile in lieu of an answer. There had been two years of going to Gracie Mansion, going to City Hall, going to Brownsville, going to Queens, and I was accustomed to her deflections. For every question I asked about her family, she asked me one about mine. This happened one morning over breakfast, at a diner in Park Slope, when I brought up her work with the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization to which she belonged in the 1970s. Her membership in Combahee had figured in what was, for McCray, a strange coming out of sorts during the campaign. The New York Observer found an article that McCray wrote in the late ’70s that described her years as a journalist and an activist and her struggle to feel comfortable as a black lesbian. In it she wrote: ‘‘Telling my story has not been easy for me. I’ve had to dredge up memories I would have rather forgotten. The lonely, anxiety-ridden months I avoided others, attempting to hide from interrogations about my social life. The questions I couldn’t or refused to answer . . . the inescapable nightmares of being rejected by family and friends. The morning when tension­-racked and covered with hives, my body would be raw from my incessant scratching. Through all this I pretended that being known as a lesbian didn’t bother me, that it was only a problem for other people. Yet, for me and for many women like me, being lesbian today means living in fear of discovery and in fear of not being liked. Nothing has brought me greater misery or stagnation than those fears.’’

In 1974, when McCray joined roughly 30 other black feminists in Boston to start Combahee, they were interested in the ‘‘interlocking’’ nature of race, gender, sexuality and class. The organization took its name from the only military campaign ever led by a woman on U.S. soil — a Unionist, patriotic act by Harriet Tubman that she considered to be one of her greatest triumphs. The group wrote a mission statement about black female activism and organizing that is still taught in many women’s studies programs. They tried to identify the specific joys and difficulties of black womanhood in America, writing:

‘‘Black feminists and many more black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ‘‘ladylike’’ and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening.’’

The group sponsored retreats and built coalitions with other feminist organizations. It tried to create a support system in which the members could be themselves and support others who needed it: black female domestic-abuse victims, prisoners and artists.

At breakfast, McCray remarked on the book I was carrying: Michele Wallace’s seminal black feminist text from 1978, ‘‘Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman,’’ which sought to shed light on the black women who were dismissed during the black-liberation movement. ‘‘Oh, wow, I haven’t seen that book in years,’’ McCray said. The book set us off into a freewheeling discussion of everything from our shared Ghanaian ancestry to her belief that today’s feminist movement was just as robust as it was in the 1970s. She told me about her work, over the years, advocating for more domestic-violence shelters in the city. She ran through the names of organizations she wanted to work with, visibly excited that her new role would let her do this kind of work full time. Soon we were finished eating, and McCray’s security detail led her out of the restaurant.

Moments later, as I walked down the street, I saw someone waving me at me. It was McCray, doing some grocery shopping. It all looked very normal, if you failed to notice the undercover police officer beside her and the large black S.U.V. trailing them. I wondered how all of that attention felt for a woman who once wrote, in a poem for a black feminist anthology in 1983, that:

I used to thinkI can’t be a poetbecause a poem is being everything you can bein one moment,speaking with lightning protestunveiling a fiery intellector letting the words drift feather-softinto the ears of strangerswho will suddenly understandmy beautiful and tortured soul.But, I’ve spent my life as a Black girla nappy-headed, no-haired,fat-lipped,big-bottomed Black girland the poem will surely come out wronglike me.

And, I don’t want everyone looking at me.

Each time McCray and I talked, she was keen to give me what she called ‘‘context’’: photos of her family life, the brown cloth dolls her mother made, stories about tables full of fruits and vegetables from the garden her father tended. McCray was born in 1954 in Springfield, Mass. It was clear that she was not at all comfortable with how her childhood had been portrayed by the press. McCray was too guarded to linger on the hardship of growing up a black girl in an all-white world, but it seemed to bother her that her childhood was perceived as evidence of some unique damage. She repeatedly stressed that her parents worked hard to provide for their three girls. ‘‘They were both coming from families who were broken or missing, and they didn’t know how to do it right, and they were very smart, and they put pieces in place,’’ she said.

The McCrays moved to Longmeadow, Mass., where the schools were ranked highly, in 1965. Their house was new, and they were proud that nobody had lived in it before. Her father worked at a nearby air base, and her mother worked at an electronics factory, but they told Chirlane, their eldest daughter, to tell the neighbors that their mother stayed home, like the other mothers.

It was a house filled with pragmatic books like encyclopedias and Reader’s Digests. ‘‘Every Christmas, I would get one book for Christmas, in my stocking,’’ McCray told me. In 1970, when McCray was 16, she got ‘‘The Bluest Eye,’’ Toni Morrison’s first novel, about a young black girl’s desire to conform to the beauty standards of white America. When she was a child, McCray told me, ‘‘there were not a lot of black books.’’ McCray’s discovery of black writers like Morrison convinced her that she, too, had a story to tell.

‘‘I was hungry for it,’’ she said. ‘‘My life was very compartmentalized. I went to a school that was all white and then I went home and to my black family.’’

By the time McCray began college at Wellesley in 1972, the most riotous years of the civil rights and feminist movements had passed. But in some ways, Wellesley had not totally caught up to the mood of revolution. Stella Dong, a friend of McCray’s, said that just a decade earlier, one socially prominent student’s decision to drop out of the school to plan her wedding was not considered unusual. McCray remembers ‘‘a very positive environment,’’ but she also recalled that ‘‘there was a black table and a white table and, you know, you’re expected to conform to that.’’ She added: ‘‘I was part of the experiments they were doing at the time. It was ‘salt and pepper.’ Salt and pepper is when you have a black roommate and a white roommate together. That was their advancement.’’

After college, McCray attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course and then got a job as a low-level editor at Redbook. A senior editor there remembers her as being ‘‘very composed, determined, with her eye on the prize.’’ While at the magazine, McCray started an organization called Black Women in Publishing. ‘‘I felt like, ‘Whom do you talk to?’ ’’ she said. ‘‘There was one black woman at Random House, one black at — whatever, you get the idea. . . . It was a way for us to connect.’’

She had spent only a few years in publishing when she realized that it wasn’t for her. By contrast, her new jobs at City Hall — first in the press office, then as a speechwriter for Dinkins — were dynamic. Better still, she recalled, they provided a way to ‘‘know everything that’s going on in the city.’’ It was only a few weeks into her new job that McCray met a lanky and insistent young Dinkins aide who, unfazed by rumors of her sexuality, began pursuing her for a date.

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CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

More than two decades later, McCray and de Blasio invited me to join them on a balcony at City Hall. The sun was out after a relentless winter and what had been, until that day, a very bleak spring. Sitting side by side, they stretched out and took a long breath, basking in a rare moment of quiet, sunlight and togetherness.

Their journey back to the building had been circuitous and improbable. But this was also a relationship that had come full circle in the halls of government. They were a family whose kids had spent the night at the Clintons’ White House and had been passing out pamphlets for their father in Park Slope since childhood. I was curious to know how public life had shaped their partnership, and we eased slowly into a conversation about something Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia often spoke about in the 1930s: the personal responsibility of leadership.

‘‘When you think about it,’’ de Blasio said, ‘‘there’s almost a ministerial or pastoral element to this work, you know?’’ He paused. ‘‘Of course, there is ego, realities and other things, too. But on one level, it’s supposed to be very selfless work. It’s supposed to be a higher calling, and I think for Chirlane and me both, that was sort of unspoken,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s not another part of your life or a separate part of your life; it is absolutely integrated into your life, and I don’t think either one of us would have done well with someone who didn’t see the world that way. I think we actually had to find someone who understood things that way.’’

Three weeks after the inauguration, McCray gave her first solo speech as first lady of New York, at the Christian Cultural Center, a church in Canarsie, Brooklyn. With almost 40,000 parishioners, the C.C.C. is the sort of megachurch that is more common in Atlanta or Houston or some other wealthy black urban center. It seemed like an odd choice for McCray, who has a background in social-justice circles and no stated religious affiliation. But the C.C.C. has a large black-and-immigrant congregation, and McCray was there to talk about immigration reform as well as the high rates of incarceration and the deportation of black immigrants.

The speech marked a transition. McCray was stepping into her role and taking on more official duties. And the inauguration also ushered in a new, critical tone from the media about McCray. The press corps at times seemed invested in misunderstanding her. In those first few weeks, several newspapers made a big deal about a Quinnipiac University poll that found that a majority of New Yorkers believed a mayoral spouse should have a minor-to-nonexistent role in City Hall. Soon the mayor was described as getting short with a reporter who asked about McCray’s role. One publication wrote early on that McCray had cornrows when she has dreadlocks; later McCray made pointed comments on her Tumblr about the importance of diversity in the press. Overnight, McCray, who is often quiet to the point of timidity, was portrayed as a power-hungry enforcer, a stereotypical black woman who was now in control of City Hall.

For those who wanted to cast her as a rogue leftist overstepping her role, McCray’s first appointment — a chief of staff, Rachel Noerdlinger — served as confirmation. Noerdlinger was formerly a spokeswoman for the Rev. Al Sharpton, and to those who saw Sharpton’s bombastic public persona and rallies as the worst kind of spectacle, McCray’s pick looked like left-wing cronyism. Just three weeks after her husband took office, The New York Daily News published two letters from its readers about ‘‘Chirlane de Blasio.’’ ‘‘Here we go,’’ one read. ‘‘Only 22 days on the job and already our mayor’s wife, Chirlane, is hiring herself a chief of staff at a six-figure salary. Who is paying? Us poor slobs, that’s who. Now I know who wears the pants in the mayor’s family.’’

Noerdlinger had not even started her job when she was accused of being duplicitous, retaining her loyalty to Sharpton instead of switching it to de Blasio and McCray. De Blasio and McCray seemed to anticipate the criticism at a Sharpton-hosted ceremony honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., where McCray justified the hiring by saying Noerdlinger was a ‘‘pro’’ and ‘‘someone who believes in . . . Dr. King’s vision of equality.’’

At the C.C.C., McCray told the story of her great-grandmother’s journey from Barbados to New Hampshire, where she worked as the servant for a white family. If McCray’s speech at the C.C.C. felt familiar, it was, in part, because the words channeled her husband’s approach, which is homey, down to earth and full of hopeful bromides about working together. It is a quality that de Blasio shares with Barack Obama: the inflections, the backslapping, the cultural shape-shifting modes of interacting. I once watched de Blasio, in his off-the-rack gray suit, trade high-fives with a young black man in City Hall, calling him ‘‘my brother,’’ as if they had grown up as best friends somewhere in Brooklyn.

McCray, by contrast, was an uneasy speaker, even in front of an easy crowd. She clearly understood the kind of showmanship that was required for the occasion, but her attempts often fell flat. She was nervous, and it showed. Many black politicians adopt a kind of vernacular that has its roots in the church, but McCray paid that tradition very little mind. Her mannerisms were awkward, her voice occasionally wavered and she paused often for applause that was not forthcoming. ‘‘Is Barbados in the house?’’ she asked stiffly. Yet, when she finished, the crowd stood and cheered loudly, like proud mothers at a school recital. Her performance didn’t matter; her presence was enough.

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Chirlane McCray and Bill de Blasio and their children, Chiara and Dante, after his inauguration in 2014.CreditPhotograph by Rob Bennett

The next day, The Post reported that she had been tardy, and very few journalists reported how the crowd treated her as one of their beloved own.

Black politics in New York City has always been a story about the dearth of representation. Until the 1950s and 1960s, when men like Major Owens, Percy Sutton, Charles Rangel and Dinkins and women like Shirley Chisolm and Anna Arnold Hedgeman came into power, black New Yorkers had hardly any political advocates. Though the city had an image as a racially inclusive and even progressive place, this had little foundation in its political structures. The labor activist Kim Moody wrote in his political history of New York City, ‘‘From Welfare State to Real Estate,’’ that ‘‘New York’s reputation as a racially liberal city was largely a myth.’’ He went on to trace how the Democratic Party helped whites maintain a majority of positions long after the demographics of the city had changed. Black voters were instead best represented by religious figures and well-connected activists like Sharpton. This meant that black voters were often powerless to respond after the fact to policies that had rigged their communities to fail.

The story of one pivotal black neighborhood essentially began on May 27, 1945, when Mayor La Guardia went on WNYC to tell the city about the enormous public-housing projects that the city was planning to build. At that time, Brownsville was already what some might call a ‘‘ghetto’’: Its residents were largely poor and working-class Jewish families, who tended to view the neighborhood as Brooklyn’s version of the Lower East Side. But as the academic Wendell Prichett wrote in his history of Brownsville, between 1940 and 1950, Brownsville’s black population almost doubled, and by 1957 it was up to 22 percent. The towers would house more than 100,000 people, and they would be located in areas like East Harlem and Brownsville.

‘‘Great care,’’ La Guardia said in his radio address, ‘‘has been taken in the selection of the sites. All are in undesirable areas where there is not the slightest possibility of rehabilitation through private enterprise.’’ In the mind of the mayor and the city’s greatest and most megalomaniacal planner, Robert Moses, Brownsville, as Moses said, was simply a ‘‘neighborhood which needs to be cleared and apparently can be rehabilitated in no other way.’’ In Brownsville, Pritchett told me when I spoke to him on the phone, residents had long been ‘‘concerned about health issues, safety issues and police relations. They were concerned about the quality of the housing.’’ They soon realized that the public housing did very little to rehabilitate the neighborhood; in fact, over time, it just exacerbated the problems, by entrenching the exclusionary zoning, the segregated schools and the segregated recreational centers.

Half a century later, Brownsville, which is now overwhelmingly black, remains home to the city’s most disheartening statistics, with the highest concentration of low-income housing in the United States. Forty percent of its residents live below the federal poverty level. The median household income is $31,883. The neighborhood was not born into blight; perhaps more than any other neighborhood in New York City, it is the geographical representation of what decades of racist public policy can do. And this was the significance of the blood red T-shirt I saw worn by a large man who was attending one of de Blasio’s speeches in Harlem that read, stretched over the dome of his stomach: ‘‘Mayor de Blasio, do not forget about Brownsville.’’

‘‘Under Bloomberg, this area was totally neglected, but it was a reflection of his whole policy,’’ said Inez Barron, who is the city councilwoman for Brownsville and a holdover from an older model for black political power in New York. ‘‘Bloomberg’s policy was one of supporting the wealthy, Wall Street, the capitalists, and it was not at all a policy that addressed the issues of our community in terms of housing, education, economics, jobs.’’ If de Blasio was so ready to change things, she couldn’t understand what, exactly, was taking so long.

We were in her office in East New York, a large set of older but tidy rooms full of fliers about immigration, how to sign up for pre-K and how to find a job if you are on parole. There were posters about the African Burial Grounds and reminders to remember our past so that we can go forward. Barron was not willing to write de Blasio off, but seemed wary about just how positive his mayoralty could ever be. ‘‘People may not want to acknowledge it, but there will be an undercutting of representatives from these communities that are black and Latino.’’ She stressed the importance of blacks and Latinos ‘‘having representatives that will look like them and have a connection with the issues of their communities.’’

De Blasio had been in office only a short while when he told me, sitting behind a large desk that was once La Guardia’s, that Brownsville had taken on special symbolic value for him. ‘‘The neighborhood for decades has been held back unfairly, and people have suffered a lot,’’ he said. ‘‘I certainly know enough people who have lived and worked in Brownsville who will attest to the sense of a cycle that is hard to break out of there. For me, it’s one of the places where we fundamentally have to do better.’’

One way he proposed to do that was through ‘‘universal pre-K,’’ a free prekindergarten program for any child in the five boroughs whose family wanted it. While pitching the idea that pre-K could change neighborhoods like Brownsville — places locked firmly in the grip of generational poverty — the mayor suggested that, for ‘‘about the cost of a small soy latte at your local Starbucks,’’ New Yorkers could repair the decades of neglect. During his time on the City Council he began to see that this was one way to close the chasm of wealth disparity and improve people’s quality of life in the city. It was his first proposed solution to the ‘‘tale of two cities.’’

But although there were many merits to his proposal, I was still troubled by how his rhetoric made the city’s most vulnerable sound like charity cases, rather than the victims of systematic disenfranchisement. De Blasio was somewhat taken aback. ‘‘I understand the question,’’ he said with a sigh. ‘‘And obviously there are charities: ‘For a dollar a day, you can save a child.’ I get that, and that was not the inference.’’ He continued, ‘‘It was actually constructing it more as a fair act to recognize that we were going in the wrong direction as a society and that one of the things that would help correct it was asking those who had done well to pay a little more and to achieve a very specific goal.’’

Talking with McCray, it was clear that the policy also connected to her and the mayor’s own experience as struggling new parents to their daughter Chiara 21 years ago. ‘‘At the hospital, they told us: ‘You gotta have a car seat. You can’t leave the hospital without a car seat,’ ’’ she recalled. ‘‘So we got our car seat, and we put her in it and get her home and just put her on the sofa and said: ‘O.K. Now what do we do?’ There’s no manual. Neither one of us had family we could rely on to help us in the city, we were pretty much on our own. And we had to work. Both of us had to work, it was no question.’’ Through that experience, McCray said, she came to realize that for women who are living without a safety net, having access to affordable child care could not only change the quality of their lives but also give their children a better start in life.

In each of McCray’s speeches that I attended, she spoke about pre-K as part of a solution to income inequality and poverty; according to her, it was the most logical, immediate next step in the struggle for civil rights. Some educational thinkers, including Marian Wright Edelman and Diane Ravitch, supported her advocacy. At times, though, she suggested that this single policy was a solution to all that has ailed lower-income communities. Pedro Noguera, who at the time we spoke was a professor of sociology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, told me that the city’s public schools are in trouble not because children don’t have adequate preparation but because the city’s method of funding allows for racial and class segregation that ultimately results in a kind of redlining. The opportunity to attend a high-performing school is largely determined by the neighborhood a child lives in, not access to pre-K. ‘‘The poorest kids are concentrated in the worst schools,’’ Noguera said. ‘‘And those schools are all underperforming.’’ Unlike the effects of universal health care, which directly improves the quality of life for many black Americans — 55 percent of whom are ‘‘more likely than whites to be without health insurance,’’ according to a study by the Kellogg Foundation and Ebony Magazine — those of universal pre-K were more difficult to determine.

Last February, I took the L train to Brownsville for McCray’s visit to FirstStepNYC, a model pre-K school that is the brainchild of Laura Ensler, an educational consultant and the school’s founder. When I exited the New Lots Avenue station, a group of teenage boys milled about the MetroCard machines until the rumble of an approaching train was heard; then they took off running, clearing the turnstiles like seasoned hurdlers. Out of nowhere, three police officers appeared and tried to catch the boys. It seemed like a halfhearted but still dangerous game of cat and mouse. They all knew their roles so well that the station attendant didn’t even bother to look up.

Stepping inside the FirstStepNYC center a few blocks away was like entering another world. There, the children were served family-style organic meals, the classrooms were immaculate and centered in each room were oversize couches and large wooden bookcases, all stocked with classic children’s books. It was a state-of-the-art facility, and for its local student body, the school embodied possibility. It allowed parents to work without being concerned about their child’s welfare and provided its students with the kind of education most often found in private schools or wealthy districts.

McCray busied herself drilling holes with a student named Joshua, who used a real (but safe) child-size power tool on a block of wood with the help of his teacher.

‘‘Look at all of these beautiful holes,’’ she said as she crouched down next to him, ‘‘What do you call these?’’

‘‘Drill bits!’’ he shouted without looking up from his task. He pressed down hard until there was a small hole in the middle of the block. At this, McCray turned to Ensler and remarked: ‘‘When you said real tools, I never imagined you meant real tools. Wow.’’

McCray settled herself into the center of the room for story time. She held ‘‘Whistle for Willie,’’ by Ezra Jack Keats. As she read, she stopped from time to time to ask the students questions.

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McCray at the C.E.O. Summit on Mental Health in the Workplace at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 29 last year.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

‘‘Can you run away from your shadow?’’ McCray asked the kids.

‘‘No!’’ a little girl said. ‘‘You can’t run away from your shadow, because you’re not that fast!’’

As voters, we like to believe that each election erases whatever came before, but that is not the case. In New York City, protests, marches and riots are some of the long, thin threads that connect one mayoral administration to the next. During the 1977 blackout, when Abraham D. Beame was mayor, there was mass looting; in 1980 there were protests in Harlem after Edward I. Koch announced that he would close Sydenham Hospital, the first fully integrated private hospital in the country and one that, during his campaign, he had promised would remain open. Dinkins’s term was pockmarked by the riots in Crown Heights and a protest by 10,000 police officers who not only blocked the Brooklyn Bridge but overran City Hall, shouting racial slurs about Dinkins. That was in 1992.

The protests that arrived during the summer of de Blasio and McCray’s first year in Gracie Mansion didn’t come as a surprise to everyone, but their quiet intensity did. Eric Garner’s death happened during a season of death and civil unrest across the country, and that summer was an abrupt reminder of what occurs when there is a disconnect between the ‘‘safe’’ issues that elected officials tend to focus on and the rawer issues of racial justice that the Black Lives Matter movement raised.

I was at a march in Tompkinsville, the Staten Island neighborhood where Garner was choked by Daniel Pantaleo, a police officer who was trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes, when I saw a sign that said, ‘‘It’s de Blasio’s time and Eric Garner is dead.’’ Another asked, ‘‘Since when is resisting arrest a capital crime? Where is Eric Garner’s quality of life?’’ But the one that really stayed with me was held up by a solemn-faced middle-age black woman: ‘‘Faith in N.Y. will not go back.’’

Did this administration still have an understanding of what their voters cared about most? Polling of black voters is surprisingly thin, but several surveys found that economic issues like employment and housing are the most pressing issues for black voters. This is especially true now: Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, and homeownership, the one greatest prognosticator of economic stability, fell to 43 percent last year from 49 percent in 2004 for black Americans (compared with 67 percent for whites). Black millennials are also disproportionately likely to know a victim of murder and to know someone who feels as if he or she has been a victim of police brutality or harassment. These are issues that do not face every voter, but they are issues that can no longer be pushed to the margins when black voters go to the polls.

During the protests, much of the anger directed at de Blasio and McCray was born of impatience. The protesters were from a younger generation who had seen just how little playing by the rules had accomplished. They had been promised more, and now they wanted a change in policy. Some of them saw de Blasio’s behavior as a disavowal of the one promise that had tipped the scales in his favor. ‘‘De Blasio has made some really great moves when it comes to universal pre-K and definitely paid sick days,’’ Monifa Bandele, founding member of the Malcolm X Grassroots movement and an organizer of some of the city’s largest protests, told me one afternoon over the phone, at the height of the protests. ‘‘But one of the key pieces that he ran on was reforming policing in New York City. And at the core of racial profiling and aggressive policing in New York is broken windows and the broken-windows policy. And he still has yet to really disavow broken windows as a tactic.’’

For de Blasio and McCray, the protests were an emotionally charged and extremely delicate moment. When the grand jury announced there would be no indictment in the Garner case, de Blasio tried to express what many parents of minority children living in America feel: that ‘‘children of color, especially young men of color,’’ have to be ‘‘very careful when they have . . . an encounter with a police officer.’’ He spoke personally, explaining that because of what his mixed-race children look like, it is possible that policemen will see them as criminals. The statement enraged many of the city’s police officers and put him on the outs with officers he was supposed to lead.

And yet movement leaders like Bandele remained unimpressed. ‘‘He said that he has to prep his son about how to go about the city, how painful it is,’’ she told me. ‘‘I think that many of us are just looking at the TV like, ‘You know, you’re the mayor!’ ’’ Bandele chuckled at the strangeness of de Blasio’s dilemma: ‘‘Don’t be sad about it! Fix it!’’

What was of more interest to me was what the protests were like for McCray: the woman who had promised to speak for the voiceless. After two police officers were murdered in Brooklyn that December, the climate of the city was so intense that McCray became the target of ire when, at the funeral of one of the officers, she wore a blue suit vaguely resembling a tie-dye print. Although she would later write about her grief during this period in an editorial for Essence’s Black Lives Matter issue, when I checked McCray’s Instagram feed that spring, instead of seeing anything about Eric Garner or Ferguson, I found the sort of images one might expect from a first lady: pictures of her hosting Kate Middleton and other British dignitaries, one of her giving a speech at the United Nations about women’s rights and another about celebrating her birthday with her family.

When Joan Didion covered the city’s troubling but emblematic response to the Central Park Five case for The New York Review of Books, in 1991, she took more than a few pages to describe the black power vacuum in New York City. The absence of black advocates and mayoral neglect were, she explained, what created Al Sharpton. ‘‘Sharpton,’’ she wrote, ‘‘did not exactly fit the roles New York traditionally assigns, for maximum audience comfort, to prominent blacks. He seemed in many ways a phantasm, someone whose instinct for the connections between religion and politics and show business was so innate that he had been all his life the vessel for other people’s hopes and fears.’’ This was the quality that has allowed him to remain one of the few public black men in a city that often corsets most of its black elected officials. Didion wrote that Sharpton had ‘‘disqualified’’ himself from playing the role of ‘‘the Good Negro, the credit to the race, the exemplary if often imagined figure whose refined manners and good grammar could be stressed and who could be seen to lay, as Jimmy Walker said of Joe Louis, ‘a rose on the grave of Abraham Lincoln.’ ’’ Instead, she continued, ‘‘it was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself,’’ as the outrageous spokesman for black New Yorkers.

Didion was making an indictment of Sharpton’s nature and a pointed comment on the undercurrent of racism found in the city’s treatment of black figures, especially those who at all dared to be themselves or, worse, who try to serve the interests of their communities.

Sharpton is an outsider who has become so central to how black power-brokering works in New York that even people who do not particularly like Sharpton understand his importance. He was used to coming to the defense when attacks came, just as he did with Noerdlinger, his former chief of staff, who later left City Hall after a series of personal and professional controversies. During the campaign, when The New York Post mocked McCray (it published a cartoon that depicted de Blasio in bed with a dramatically busty McCray, both of them dressed in lingerie and smoking, as she says, ‘‘I used to be a lesbian but my husband, Bill de Blasio, won me over’’), Sharpton was one of the first people, other than her husband, to stand up for her. Soon de Blasio was at Sharpton’s House of Justice, in Harlem, chastising The Post. ‘‘First, my first response is as a husband and a father: ‘Leave my wife alone, leave my children alone.’ And don’t misinterpret that sentence for a moment to mean that Chirlane McCray cannot defend herself, because I assure you she can.’’ Although he was following Bloomberg’s model, de Blasio has worked harder than any of his predecessors to keep Sharpton in his fold.

Sharpton was born in Brownsville, but the offices of his Justice Network take up an entire floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan. The halls are lined with blown-up covers of Sharpton on Newsweek, Time and an image of him from The New York Observer. There is Sharpton with Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a rally for Trayvon Martin. Sharpton and Obama, Sharpton and James Brown. His assistant at the time, Jackie, a young white woman with long blond hair and exacting manners, offered me tea while I waited to see him.

I wanted to ask him: As one of the men most associated with a certain kind of civil rights, did he feel that de Blasio as a white mayor and Chirlane McCray as a black first lady represented an authentic breaking of a glass ceiling?

In person, Sharpton is surprisingly small, with an aged but not tired face that plays second fiddle to his straight, gray slicked-back hair. He looked at me intently as he answered. ‘‘I think that it goes back to goals,’’ he said. ‘‘In my lifetime, I went through the ‘let’s elect a black, put a black in power.’ Dave Dinkins, Harold Washington.’’ He paused for two beats and said: ‘‘Then, I met Clarence Thomas. And I realized if it is just on blackness and not the right black, you haven’t really made progress. So do I really want a black who will say, ‘I’m ending affirmative action, or this that and the other’? Or do I want someone who might be biracial, who is going to fight for equity and parity? It is the goal. The goals have got to supersede all of the biases, even in civil rights circles.’’

I read him Didion’s description of him, the one in which she described his ability to remain vocal and brazen as the key to his longevity and his conspicuousness. I asked him if being first lady would force McCray to change or neuter her personality. At that, his voice rose and trembled with frustration, finally becoming the voice I associate with Sharpton the leader who made black churchgoing grandmothers proud enough to send him a donation, no matter what they said about him.

‘‘Yeah, they are gonna try to neuter Chirlane’s voice, and they are gonna keep trying to do it to Michelle,’’ he said. ‘‘But what we got to understand is that they do that as a symbol of trying to neuter my daughters, so I fight for them because Dominique and Ashley don’t have a shot if they are gonna try and do that to the first lady of New York and first lady of the country.’’

He finished by shaking his head. It was a breathless, convincing speech, and just as soon as it reached its fiery peak, it was over. A phone buzzed. He picked it up. The interview was over.

Image

Mayor David Dinkins with McCray, who served as a speechwriter in his administration, in 1993.CreditPhotograph from Chirlane McCray

In October, McCray announced that she would soon hang a portrait of a formerly enslaved man on the walls of Gracie Mansion. The buttermilk milkmaid and her lover would be joined by Pierre Toussaint. McCray wrote on her Instagram: ‘‘The same year that my now-home, Gracie Mansion, was built, New York State passed an act that emancipated the enslaved Africans. Gradually. In 1799, New York was home to many different cultures and traditions. Insofar as Gracie Mansion exists to honor history, it should tell the stories of all New Yorkers.’’

Six hundred days after the inauguration, I asked McCray in an email message what she would say if she had to campaign again and sell the city on her husband’s efforts. A week later, she sent me a response that detailed all that her husband’s administration had accomplished until then. That very morning, she wrote, ‘‘65,000 of our city’s 4-year-olds started their day in free, universal, high-quality pre-K.’’ That afternoon, ‘‘thousands of middle schoolers will participate in free after-school programs.’’ She added: ‘‘Today, a young woman who has contributed to this city for years in the shadows will get her IDNYC and join the ranks of official New Yorkers. And tonight, thousands more families will rest under a safe roof, off the streets. We consider it one of our highest callings to make sure that all families in New York City can afford a place to call home. We’re making progress. 200K affordable apartments are on track to be built by 2025 — enough to house half a million people. These are the scenes I would describe to New Yorkers right now. We have improved many lives. But not enough.’’

It was impressive, but it read like a stump speech. So I asked for a phone call. The press person told me that she would try to get McCray to answer some questions, but reiterated that McCray ‘‘wanted to look forward’’ and focus on the mental-health program she announced last fall; she wanted that to be understood. She and her daughter had announced the program with a video: a very frank but endearingly awkward conversation about Chiara’s struggle with depression. After getting the runaround for weeks from her press person, I finally received an email saying that McCray was willing to talk on the phone.

As promised, she wanted to make certain that I understood exactly why they were focusing on an $850 million health initiative. It was the first time I understood that despite how Pollyannaish it sounded to some, in McCray’s mind, mental health was the key to how the city uses police officers, prisons, hospitals and schools. Those institutions were being burdened with responsibilities that they were not trained to deal with.

In two years, I am not sure I ever got to see McCray with her guard totally down; the conditions were not right. As she told me once, she thought it was a shame we were forced to meet this way. But in this last conversation, McCray made a remark that briefly lifted the scrim. We were discussing why she thought preventive measures or the long view mattered so much to her, when she interjected to remind me that ‘‘everyone needs coping skills. Everyone needs to learn resilience. Some of us come into this world better than others, but we all benefit by learning these skills that will help us throughout this life, which we don’t control.’’

I had observed McCray enough to know that this is exactly what she had done as a black girl in a predominately white Massachusetts; and again as a young black lesbian at Wellesley; and, later, in jobs where she was often the only black woman. She had coped and looked forward.

‘‘I think,’’ McCray continued, as if we were speaking as two women and not as a first lady to a writer, ‘‘that when people know that there’s a solution to a frustration that they have, it just makes it easier to work through. I think that’s what we’re seeing. . . . Once people realize that there’s a solution, it just changes everything. It changes the way they feel and think about something. I think that a large part of the fear people have, and the frustration about anything, is not knowing what the answer is, how to get through it.’’

I asked if she became exhausted herself.

‘‘No,’’ she said. ‘‘I know that it takes time to change a culture. It takes time to change public conversation.’’

Last year I read about an address Michelle Obama gave at Tuskegee University that considered the uniqueness of her position: ‘‘ ‘What kind of first lady would I be? What kinds of issues would I take on?’ . . . The truth is, those same questions would have been posed to any candidate’s spouse. But, as potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud or too angry or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?’’

These questions are relevant because McCray and Obama are black first ladies in a country in which women of color still have to ask a question posed by Sojourner Truth a century ago: ‘‘Ain’t I a woman?’’ They are black first ladies in a country where there’s little relation between the realities of black women and those ‘‘ladies’’ who do not look like them. So to be a black first lady is to highlight how little room there has been for women of color to thrive in the political realm, not to mention in real life. Black voters are used to having to accept tacitly the fact that black political figures, especially black women, cannot loudly own their identities; the consequences are simply too great. As the political landscape diversifies, you wonder: Will the penalty for being yourself always be so punishing? Once women or minorities are placed in positions of power — or even merely near power — will they ever be allowed to truly and boldly author themselves?

Correction:

An article on Feb. 14 about Chirlane McCray, the wife of Mayor Bill de Blasio, misstated a recollection by McCray’s friend Stella Dong about Wellesley College in the 1970s. She said that a generation earlier it was not considered unusual for a student to drop out of the school to plan her wedding, not that it was common while she and McCray attended.

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is a contributing writer for the magazine and has written for The Paris Review, Rolling Stone and The Believer. Her most recent article was a profile of Toni Morrison.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Chirlane McCray and the Limits of First-Ladyship. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe